Salem Political Snark

I debunk conspiracy theories about the Ukraine war

Recently I heard from someone opposed to the war in Ukraine. Their reasons sounded screwy to me, so I decided to fact-check what they said.

It just took me a few minutes of Googling to debunk virtually all of their objections to the Ukraine war, which in my opinion, is totally justified -- since it was Putin, the autocratic leader of Russia, who invaded Ukraine about a year ago for no good reason.

The United States, the European Union, and other allies are strong backers of the democratically-elected government of Ukraine against Putin's attempt to rekindle the bad old days of World War II, the last time a sovereign European nation was invaded by another country seeking to expand its territory.

Below, in italics, is what the person who messaged me said. My debunking of those conspiracy theories is in regular type.

FIRST FALSE STATEMENT. The US started the war in Ukraine when we overthrew the elected government that favored close relations with Russia. Obama and Victoria Nuland confirmed our involvement led to that 'revolution'. Yes, that overthrown government was corrupt, but so is the current government of Ukraine.

 

This was an easy statement to debunk, since the well-respected Politifact addressed this claim. Excerpts from their Pants on Fire conclusion.

It’s a conspiracy with mainstream crossover: The United States bankrolled the bloody political uprising in Ukraine.

We saw the claim pop up recently in a story on RT (the Russian-funded English language cable network), and found lots of talk about it on reddit, Facebook and other websites.

The claims have the same basic structure. While President Barack Obama publicly said Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into the country to promote regime change.

In a Facebook meme, someone put it this way:

Obama "spends $5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government."

So is there any truth to this claim? PunditFact dove in.

...Our ruling

Contrary to claims, the United States did not spend $5 billion to incite the rebellion in Ukraine.

That’s a distorted understanding of remarks given by a State Department official. She was referring to money spent on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since it broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991.

We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

 

SECOND FALSE STATEMENT. We also started the war when we broke our promises to not move NATO east after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Politifact also examined this claim. Here's some excerpts from their Mostly False conclusion. 

Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine with an assault that intelligence officials had warned was coming, conservative commentator Candace Owens insisted that the U.S. was "at fault."

"NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward," Owens said in the Feb. 22 tweet, which directed her more than 3 million followers to remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin that she said showed "what’s actually going on." 

Owens’ comment echoed a grievance claimed by Putin and other Russian leaders regarding the West’s negotiations with the Soviet Union after the Cold War. 

The subject of the grievance is whether the U.S. and its Western allies promised the Soviet Union during negotiations over the reunification of Germany that they would not allow NATO to expand its membership east of the Cold War border.

...Our ruling

Owens said, "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward."

There is an ongoing historical debate over comments that Western leaders, including Baker, made during post-Cold War negotiations, and whether what they said amounted to assurances that NATO would refrain from welcoming in countries closer to modern-day Russia. 

But NATO as an organization made no such pledge, and the formal agreement signed at the end of those negotiations said nothing about the alliance not expanding eastward.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

THIRD FALSE STATEMENT. This war and most of our other wars are primarily profit generators for our arms and oil industries.  Our inflation was caused by price gouging by the oil industry and not by the slightly higher pay for employees. The war gave us an excuse to blowup Nordstream 2 so that we could sell more gas to Europe. 

 

What's almost certainly false in this statement is the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline.

 

I also disagree that the Ukraine war is primarily a profit generator for our arms and oil industries, since our motivation for supporting Ukraine is to protect a democratic nation against an unprovoked invasion by Russia. I do agree that price gouging by the oil industry is a primary reason for our high gasoline prices, but other countries also have higher fuel prices caused by Putin's war.

 

Snopes looked into the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline. It found that this claim was based on a single anonymous source, so it isn't very credible. Excerpts:

On Feb. 8, 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published on Substack a theoretically blockbuster revelation: A covert U.S. military operation in June 2022 was responsible for the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines that run natural gas from Russia to Germany. The claim has been met with skepticism by other journalists, denials from U.S. government officials, and credulous promotion in Russia.

In this article, Snopes explores the controversy, separating the factual background in Hersh's reporting that provides an air of plausibility to his blockbuster claims from the anonymously sourced assertions of a single person that hold — however weakly — those claims together. By email, we asked Hersh to respond to criticism that his article's claims are based on a single source. We also asked if any undisclosed parties verified or vetted any of that source's assertions as part of his reporting. In response, he told Snopes, "I protect my sources."

...The Bottom Line

This story, when deconstructed, is merely a pile of purported second-hand information allegedly collected by someone connected in some unknown way to deliberations of a highly secret, multi-agency task force. Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms of other more recent work published by Hersh, which has relied on similarly questionable anonymous sources.

If the U.S. did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, Hersh's reporting has not proved that case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful blog post that essentially transcribes a compelling story someone unknown to the general public told him.

Hersh was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on." 

FOURTH PARTLY FALSE STATEMENT. For evidence that this is a war for profit not for Ukraine note that Ukraine desperately needs tanks now, but instead of sending a few of the 4800 tanks we currently have, we are building new tanks at $10 million each to be sent in August.  Oil and arms guys love this war and do not want it to end.  We spend billions on weapons, killing Russians and civilians, and we have no body bags coming home. 

It's true that the United States is having new Abrams tanks built to send to Ukraine, rather than sending tanks from our existing inventory. A New York Post story says this is because the United States doesn't have enough excess tanks. The larger question is whether the Ukraine war is driving increased American defense spending. 

A New York Times story says that while the Ukraine war is a factor, the bipartisan push to increase our defense spending also stems from longer term concerns about threats from Russia and China.

The prospect of growing military threats from both China and Russia is driving bipartisan support for a surge in Pentagon spending, setting up another potential boom for weapons makers that is likely to extend beyond the war in Ukraine.

...Even more orders are coming in to military contractors from U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, as they too have concluded they must do more to arm themselves against rising global threats. Japan moved this month to double its spending on defense over the next five years, putting aside a pacifist stand it has largely maintained since 1945.

Marjorie Taylor Greene gives Joe Biden a gigantic gift

Watching last night's State of the Union address was highly pleasurable for me in several ways.

One, Biden gave a great speech with energy belying his 80 years. Two, ultra-MAGA-crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Biden a great gift when she yelled "you lie" and other things at him while doing her best angry baboon imitation.

(To those who think it's insulting to baboons to pair them with Greene, the image popped up in my Twitter feed today, so complain to whoever came up with this inspired comparison -- which admittedly puts baboons in a bad light that they don't deserve.)

This was a truly memorable State of the Union address. Long-time observers of the ritual said that Biden's speech was the most confrontational in modern times, and maybe ever.

President Biden correctly recognized that while it was important to praise the bipartisanship that helped make his first two years such a legislative success, this is the beginning of what appears to be his reelection campaign, so the stark differences between how congressional Republicans and Democrats view our nation's problems and potential needed to be stressed.

Even so, the speech was shaping up to be fairly traditional until Greene and her MAGA cronies decided to ignore the advice of Speaker McCarthy to his caucus and act like jerks.

The impetus for their jerkiness, not that it takes much for the MAGA far-right to be pushed into this mode, was Biden absolutely correctly saying that some Republicans have called for the sunsetting of Medicare and Social Security, which would require that these essential entitlement programs be reauthorized by a Congress that currently can't do anything useful, given the new GOP majority in the House.

Gosh, where could Biden have gotten that sunsetting idea? Why, in part from Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who included it in his 12 point Rescue America plan that he fashioned when he was chair of the committee to elect Senate Republicans in the 2022 midterm election. 

(The GOP lost a Senate seat in that election, so obviously Scott didn't do very well.)

There it is, in the Government Reform & Debt section of Scott's plan:

Medicare and Social Security are federal legislation. So Biden was correct when he said that some congressional Republicans want to sunset these programs. And Greene's you lie outburst was wrong, which is par for the course in the world of Green's habitual purveyor of falsehoods.

But it got even better. Because Republicans at the State of the Union address kept complaining about Biden's accurate claim that some in the GOP want to sunset Social Security and Medicare. 

I loved it when Biden said that he admires conversions. Then he did some quick thinking and said that it sounds like congressional Republicans want to make sure that no cuts occur to Social Security and Medicare, that seniors will be protected.

That got a lot of applause, which meant that President Biden was able to negotiate an important aspect of upcoming budget talks with the GOP right in the middle of his State of the Union address. Now it will be virtually impossible for Republicans to try to make changes to Social Security and Medicare given how outraged they were at the very idea of this -- which, again, was part of Senator Scott's Rescue America plan.

Like most Democrats, I've been hoping that my party could find a younger alternative to Biden to run in the 2024 presidential election. I still lean that way, but Biden's masterful performance last night sure made me feel better about him. 

Whether he's able to keep up that level of energy in the coming election cycle remains to be seen. For now, what's clear is that he kicked the butt of Marjorie Taylor Greene, though she's so clueless, there's no way she'll ever understand how badly she got trounced by President Biden.

Elon Musk falsely claims thousands of NATO soldiers killed in Ukraine

For supposedly being one of the world's smartest people, Elon Musk sure can be amazingly dumb at times. 

I follow Musk on Twitter so I get to see both his interesting tweets about Space X, Tesla, and such, and his crazy tweets about things Musk obviously knows nothing about. Or does know about, and lies about them anyway.

Like, the war in Ukraine. Today I was astounded to see that Musk had replied to an obviously false tweet by Russian Market where it was claimed that thousands of NATO troops had died in Ukraine.

Yeah, Elon, it would indeed be a tragic loss of life if thousands of NATO soldiers had been killed in Ukraine. But actually there aren't any NATO soldiers in Ukraine, much less dying there. It's hard to believe you don't know this.

So I have to think that, like Trump, you've got a love affair going with Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat. David Frum called Musk out on his bullshit.

On the plus side, this tweet today shows that the support of the American public for Ukraine remains strong. So Musk is just part of a right-wing Russia-loving minority that prefers a dictator, Putin, over the democracy of Ukraine that Putin is trying to destroy.

We all have blind spots. But Elon Musk has an especially large blind spot when it comes to seeing disinformation in others, but not in himself. Truly astounding that on a day when Musk promulgated the false claim about NATO soldiers dying in Ukraine, he said this about the United Nations.

Look in the mirror, Elon, if you're trying to find the source of disinformation.

Police acting cruelly in Tyre Nichols videos infuriates me

Here we go again.

One more of many examples where police acted really badly, so much so five officers in the Memphis police department have been charged with second degree murder after they killed Tyre Nichols, a young man, for no reason at all.

None. Absolutely none. 

Now, many people here in Salem, Oregon are going to think, "Thank heavens our police department isn't like that." They're wrong. Our police department is exactly like that. 

Meaning, the Salem Police Department is like almost every large department in the country.

It's organized on a military-style basis. Officers in the department view themselves as protecting the city against "bad guys," rather than as public servants. Leaders of the department, including Chief Womack, are resistant to reforming the way things are done, such as by not having uniformed officers handle calls better served by a mental health specialist and medic.

So when I watched the videos of Nichols being beaten cruelly by five Memphis police officers, which led to his death in a hospital several days later, I was visualizing how easily this could happen anywhere, including Salem, because our country is so screwed-up when it comes to policing.

I saw five police officers taking turns punching and kicking and striking and pepper spraying Nichols even though he posed no threat to them. I saw the familiar sight of police officers all participating in an assault on a citizen whose car was pulled over for no discernible reason. I saw the officers joking around after the assault, ignoring Nichols, who they'd propped up against a car, all proud that one of them had held Nichols with his hands behind his back while another officer punched him in the head.

In short, what I saw was what I see every time I see a police officer: an average human being, many or most of whom have an above-average propensity for violence.

It's time to stop putting police on a pedestal. Bring them down to earth, where they belong.

Police are nothing special. They're normal people who get to carry a gun and enforce our laws. But when they act like jerks, they're worse than normal people, because five normal people don't beat up a young man until he dies from his injuries. It takes abnormally cruel people to do that, people who think they can get away with murder, literally, because they wear a police uniform.

What was released today by the Memphis Police Department were several videos of the Nichols assault. The body cam videos are confusing to watch. A video taken by a camera on a light pole provides the clearest, and most infuriating, view of the assault by the police officers. It can be viewed here.

If you don't want to watch the disturbing video, I completely understand. But I hope you will watch it. It's important to see how police officers act when they think they're above the law, because they are the law. Again, like jerks, strutting around like the cowards that they are, all proud that five large police officers were able to beat up a 140 pound young man.

A Black man. And the five police officers charged with his murder also are Black.

Which goes to show that while racism in police departments is a problem, an even bigger problem is the police culture that allows a group of officers to gang up on brutally beating a citizen without any officer raising an objection.

Nichols was pulled out of his car and thrown to the ground without any explanation. He was complying with police orders, but the asshole Memphis officers kept yelling conflicting demands at him. Like get on the ground when he was already on the ground, and show me your hands when they were holding his arms.

Understandably, Nichols took off running. Almost certainly he was afraid for his life, a totally valid fear, as it turns out. He was just a few hundred yards from his home. He wanted to run home to his mother. He yelled "Mother!" several times while the police were assaulting him. 

A New York Times story describes what happened next. Again, infuriating. 

Roughly eight minutes later, after a pursuit, officers locate Mr. Nichols in a suburban neighborhood, not far from his home, and tackle him to the ground. A severe beating ensues as Mr. Nichols cries out in pain and yells repeatedly for his mother. A body-worn camera and a surveillance camera capture police officers continuing their assault on Mr. Nichols, with one kicking him so hard in the face that the officer nearly falls down.

Throughout the beating, which lasts about three minutes, Mr. Nichols does not appear to ever strike back. Several times, he moves his hands to cover his face, seeming to cower from the officers’ blows.

As an officer hits him from behind with a baton, Mr. Nichols stands up and staggers while officers hang on to his arms. As two officers hold his arms behind his back, a third officer delivers a series of powerful punches. Finally, after that officer hits Mr. Nichols three times in the head while standing behind him, Mr. Nichols collapses to the ground.

Back at the scene of the traffic stop, body camera video from an officer who did not join the chase captures his reaction around the time that he learns that his colleagues have caught up with Mr. Nichols. “I hope they stomp his ass,” he says, twice.

By the end of the pummeling, Mr. Nichols is lying on his back, appearing dizzy. The officers drag him over to a police car and sit him up against it. The video images do not show him receiving any serious medical attention for several minutes.

Mr. Nichols, who worked at a FedEx facility and was the father of a 4-year-old boy, died in a hospital three days later.

Tyre Nichols, another victim of police violence

 

I hate war, but I love tanks going to Ukraine

Being a baby boomer (I was born in 1948), my life as an American liberal has featured several wars that I opposed. 

Notably the Vietnam and Iraq wars, at least the second Iraq war. I was fine with us going into Afghanistan to take down Al Qaeda and the first Iraq war seemed justified. Then there's been U.S. involvement in a bunch of military actions. Can't remember much about them.

So by and large I've been in favor of less military spending. Up to now, my generation, unlike the generation of my mother and father, hasn't experienced a truly just war like World War II. That affects how we view the defense budget, which seems excessive.

But as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine about a year ago, I became much more interested in modern warfare.

Putin's war crimes against the Ukrainian people -- willfully killing many thousands of civilian men, women, and children, along with bombing medical facilities, schools, power generation plants, and other non-military targets -- infuriated me.

I've been following the Ukraine war closely. I read stories in the New York Times and Washington Post. I follow the frequent posts of the English language Kyiv Independent on Twitter. Whenever a story about Ukraine appears on MSNBC or CNN, I perk up my ears.

The Ukraine war is a highly just war. Russia invaded Ukraine for no reason other than a desire to take over the country. There's only one "good guy" in this war: Ukraine. There's nothing positive that can be said about Russia's invasion.

Because Putin is an insufferable authoritarian, the only way the Ukraine war is going to end is by making it so costly for Russia, Putin is forced to give up on his invasion. Ideally Ukraine takes back all of the territory Russia has taken, including Crimea. 

At the very least, Ukraine needs to reclaim most of the Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine. To do that, it's been obvious for some time that the United States and our allies need to send heavier offensive weapons to Ukraine, such as tanks and fighter planes.

Finally, an agreement has been reached for the United States to send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and for Germany and other European nations to send around 80 additional tanks, such as the German Leopard. 

Congratulations to President Biden and his national security team for navigating some treacherous political waters to get this done. Germany has been resisting supplying Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Eventually Germany said it would do this if the United States supplied Abrams tanks.

At first our defense department balked, arguing that it wasn't practical to send the Abrams. However, with this issue threatening to create a rift in support for Ukraine among the United States and European Union nations, eventually a deal was reached to get Ukraine tanks from both the U.S. and E.U.

Great news. Ukraine has made excellent use of the weapons that have been supplied to them. There's little doubt that the tanks also will be put to good use in the fight against Russia. Now, how about those fighter jets?

Biden's classified documents screwup irritates this Democrat

Even though I'm a proud member of the Democratic "tribe," I also believe that when my political party does something wrong, I should be almost as irritated as when Republicans do that thing.

I said almost because I'm a realist: even though it would be nice if I could be evenhanded when it comes to wrongdoing by Democrats and Republicans, the fact that I'm a Democrat means that I'm going to look somewhat more positively on screwups by my fellow Dems.

Which is how most parents look upon their children.

When your child gets into trouble, you're disturbed, but you know that they're basically a good kid. But if a child you don't know does the same thing, likely you'll be less forgiving.

Even so, I find it difficult to forgive President Biden for the discovery of classified documents both in a private office and in the garage of his Delaware home. Sure, there are important differences between the classified documents found in the possession of Biden and Trump.

Nonetheless, this is a huge gift to Republicans.

Just when the House GOP was looking all disorganized and chaotic following the 15 acrimonious votes needed to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, Biden's classified documents scandal makes the Democratic occupant of the White House look all disorganized and chaotic. 

After the FBI raided Trump's Florida home in search of classified documents he refused to hand over, and Biden criticized Trump for being careless with these documents, it sure seems like people in Biden's orbit should have made sure that he didn't have classified documents squirreled away, either knowingly or unknowingly.

The first discovery of Biden documents in a private office struck me as disturbing, but not all that bad. Maybe a staff member carried a box into the office that Biden never looked into. But when more classified documents were found stored next to his 1967 Corvette, I felt that was inexcusable.

I'm not a highly organized person. But I'm familiar with what's in all of the boxes stored in our garage. It just seems difficult to believe that no one in the Biden family was aware of what was in the classified documents box (assuming it was a box).

I also don't like how Biden responded to a question about this.

There was one further, odd comment in an exchange with Peter Doocy of Fox News. 

Doocy asked Biden what he was “thinking” by having classified documents “next to your Corvette.” 

Biden shot back that he would speak more about the matter soon and added, “By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So it’s not like it’s sitting out in the street.” 

Geez. Trump kept many of his classified documents in a locked storage room, and that came in for well-deserved criticism. So Biden shouldn't have implied that a locked garage is a proper repository for classified documents.

Hopefully Biden will handle this scandal better from now on.

It's great that he's being so cooperative with the Justice Department. I just wish Biden had been more honest and straightforward about how the classified documents came to be where they were found, apologizing for the screwup rather than making light of it in his Corvette comment.

GOP chaos is amusing. But GOP debt limit default is scary.

If there was any doubt that I'm a political junkie, I offer as evidence how much I enjoyed watching MSNBC last night as Republicans flamed out on a dramatic 14th attempt to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, finally succeeding on the 15th try after the last GOP rebels voted "present" rather than for another candidate.

I loved watching a fight nearly break out between two House Republicans. The conflicts in Yellowstone (TV series) are entertaining, but fictional. This was real life, beamed nationwide by CSPAN.

The most dramatic moment by far came near the end — during the 14th round of voting on Friday, in what almost everyone had hoped would be the final round.

Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had ensured all eyes would be on him, refusing to answer the initial call of the clerk and maneuvering so that he would have a later, deciding vote. He eventually voted “present” — prompting fellow Republicans who believed this would secure McCarthy’s position as speaker to give him a standing ovation.

In fact, his “present” vote left McCarthy still one vote short. As Democrats laughed and Gaetz ignored appeals from McCarthy and his allies to break the stalemate, one member’s temper boiled over: Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) began shouting at Gaetz and had to be physically restrained by another lawmaker, who grabbed Rogers, including across his mouth, and pulled him back.

Gasps could be heard across the House chamber as lawmakers realized how close they had come to a physical altercation.

However, now that McCarthy is speaker, House Republicans can turn their penchant for chaos in other directions. 

Since the Senate and presidency are still in Democratic hands, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the House to pass any legislation that damages our country -- since those bills won't be able to become law. 

But there will be plenty of investigations into the Biden administration, notwithstanding the inconvenient truth that there really is very little, if any, wrongdoing to investigate. We might even see the House voting to impeach Biden for some absurd reason, which would be a wonderful contribution to his re-election chances.

What really worries me is this: House Republicans refusing to raise the national debt limit, which probably will need to happen around August.

Political pissing matches over raising the debt limit happen with disturbing regularity, though Republicans compliantly raised it when Trump was in office, demonstrating their hypocrisy. The debt limit is an archaic law that shouldn't even exist, since it simply allows the federal government to pay bills that Congress has already authorized.

So failing to raise the debt limit doesn't affect federal spending at all. It just means that some things the federal government has agreed to pay for -- defense, Social Security, Medicare, national parks, etc. -- run the risk of not having borrowed money available to do this.

Thus not raising the debt limit is like someone refusing to pay their credit card bill, or mortgage. If this happened, their credit rating would sink like a stone. Ditto with the federal government if House Republicans were to prevent it from meeting its financial obligations.

Interest rates on government bonds would rise dramatically, since investors would want a risk premium now that the federal government has shown it can't pay all of its bills. The stock market would plummet. Social Security checks might not appear in people's bank accounts. Hospitals and doctors might not be paid for giving care to Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Nasty stuff. All so the extreme right-wing House Freedom Caucus can exercise the power that Kevin McCarthy handed over to them in exchange for them giving him the votes needed for McCarthy to become speaker.

While August may seem a long ways off, time flies and Debt Limit Default Season will be here before summer vacations end. Democrats should have raised the debt limit on their own when they had the chance.

Since they didn't, the next best thing is described in a well-argued 2021 article by Neil Buchanan, an economist and legal scholar, "The Worst Sequel of 2021: Debt Ceiling Zombies Attack!" It's well worth reading in its entirety. 

Here's a few excerpts. Basically it calls for Biden to simply ignore the debt ceiling, if Republicans refuse to raise it.

Last week, Senate Republicans announced that they have decided not to participate in the necessary adjustment of the federal debt ceiling at the end of this month, playing politics once again with the full faith and credit of the United States of America. President Biden must shut down the Republicans’ debt ceiling gambit, and he must do so now.

...The debt ceiling statute should not exist at all, but given that it does, Biden must stop Republicans from using it in this way ever again. But how can he stop them from doing their worst? By announcing, clearly and unequivocally, that he has the power and the responsibility not to allow Republicans to ruin the country. The Constitution, as we know, is not a suicide pact. Fortunately, it gives the President the power to stop this madness now.

...Not all bad policy is unconstitutional, of course, but fortunately, there are incontrovertible legal reasons that the debt ceiling cannot be used as the Republicans plan to use it.

One reason was summarized by Professor Laurence Tribe over the weekend:

Sec. 4 of the 14th Am prohibits any default on Treasury’s obligations. If Congress fails to raise the debt limit, Executive action to avoid default arguably violates Congress’s exclusive power of the purse but is the lesser of two constitutional evils.

This is a notable development, because Professor Tribe had originally expressed some skepticism about this Fourteenth Amendment-based argument when it first arose during the Republicans’ debt ceiling gambits in the Obama years. He now agrees that the relevant constitutional provision—“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”—requires the President to borrow to prevent a default that would most assuredly bring the validity of the public debt into question.

...All of which means that President Biden should do what Barack Obama never did (and what the Republicans never forced Donald Trump to do), which is to say now, in advance of any drop-dead date, that the debt ceiling cannot be used as Republicans are trying to use it. If the time comes, he must instruct the Treasury Department to pay all bills in full, using exactly as much borrowed money as Congress’s duly enacted laws require. And he should tell everyone, right now, that this is what he will do.

Even in horror movies, there is always a way that zombies can be killed, finally and truly. It is time for President Biden to put this zombie out of our misery.

Kevin McCarthy's bad day foreshadows worse House chaos

Today was supposed to be when Kevin McCarthy achieved his dream of becoming Speaker of the House, second in line for the presidency (an admittedly scary thought). He'd already had his stuff moved into the Speaker's office.

But McCarthy not only failed to be elected speaker by the new Republican House majority on the first vote, losing 19 members of his own party when he could only afford to lose four, McCarthy went down in flames on the second and third votes also, with 20 defectors on the third vote.

So it was a day of Republican chaos in the House of Representatives today. Naturally avid Democrats like me watched and listened to the proceedings with glee.

Often Democratic politics is described as being akin to herding cats. But at least someone is trying to do the herding. With House Republicans, it'd difficult to tell who is attempting to bring order to the task of choosing a speaker, which hasn't required more than one vote since 1923. 

Tomorrow the House will reconvene and try again to choose a speaker. Knowledgeable political commentators I heard today are split on whether it will be McCarthy. It should be, since McCarthy has been the House minority leader and about 90% of House Republicans backed him in the three votes today.

But that other 10% may dig in their heels, refusing to vote for McCarthy no matter how many votes are taken over many days. While ordinarily I'd view this possibility as entertaining political theatrics, the reasons that a small House Republican minority may topple McCarthy's political ambitions are worrisome.

McCarthy has been doing his best to negotiate with that 10%, attempting to give them juicy committee assignments, modify House rules to their liking, and such. However, the problem for McCarthy is that this group is aptly nicknamed the Chaos Caucus.

Meaning, they aren't interested in achieving more political power so they can enact legislation in accord with their conservative values. That was what the Freedom Caucus wanted, and the even older Tea Party Caucus wanted.

When was the last time you heard House Republicans talk about doing away with Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, and substituting a conservative alternative? It's been quite a while. These days most House Republicans are only interested in stopping Democrats from achieving their goals, not passing GOP legislation.

McCarthy apparently thought that after he lost the first vote for speaker today, his support would increase when it became apparent that since the vast majority of House Republicans favored him, the 10% who didn't would realize that McCarthy was the only viable GOP candidate to be Speaker of the House.

Not unreasonable to think that, since generally politicians want their party to succeed and are willing to sacrifice some of their own desires to advance the cause of their party.

Yet while McCarthy may well be able to cobble together enough votes tomorrow to become speaker, it's just as likely, if not more so, that the Chaos Caucus opposing him will stand firm -- since they aren't interesting in achieving legislative goals, but rather in demolishing traditional institutions and creating havoc.

Free-floating anger has replaced political strategizing in their social-media-obsessed minds. If the Republican House Chaos Caucus members can grandstand their way to pleasing their extreme right-wing base, they've succeeded, even if what they're doing harms the country and the interests of their constituents.

So even though I'd find it entertaining if the recalcitrant 10% prevents Republicans from electing a House speaker for days, or even longer, along with other political observers I'm worried about what this means for must-pass legislation in 2023.

Notably, the need to increase our nation's debt ceiling, which is basically just a commitment to pay for spending already incurred by Congress. Democrats should have done away with the debt ceiling entirely when they had the chance, since it's akin to the Electoral College: something no other country has, and the United States shouldn't have either.

Long ago, the debt ceiling was raised routinely on a bipartisan basis, the best way to do it. More recently, the debt ceiling has gotten mired in partisan politics, a less good way to do it, since raising the ceiling was held hostage to policy demands.

But as bad as that has been, with stock market crashes and worries about our nation's willingness to pay its bills and make bond interest payments, hostage taking at least involves negotiations: you give me this, and I'll give you that.

The 20 Republican House members who voted against McCarthy are right-wing extremists who would be equally willing to vote against raising the debt limit. They include Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Scott Perry.

If the House Republicans refuse to pass legislation with the aid of Democratic votes, the Chaos Caucus will have an effective veto over must-pass bills such as such as that raising the debt ceiling. This could be disastrous.

So as much as I like to see House Republicans in disarray, they need to get their act together in a semblance of "array" for the good of our country.

If a Democratic president acted like Trump, how would liberals react?

Today the January 6 committee held its final meeting to lay out criminal referrals to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. 

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.

The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.

The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.

The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.

Clearly this is a historic moment. As the above excerpt from a New York Times story says, never before has Congress referred a former president for criminal prosecution. Such didn't happen even with Nixon after his Watergate scandal was revealed. So says a TIME magazine story.

No congressional committee ever issued a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Nixon. Rather, the reverse occurred, as Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating Nixon, sent Congress a “roadmap” laying out evidence of criminal violations Nixon was believed to have committed including bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Because Nixon was a sitting president, Jaworski initially believed it made more sense for Congress to move forward with impeachment proceedings, than trying to prosecute Nixon in a court of law. Facing impeachment in the House, cratering support from his fellow Republicans, and looming criminal charges from a grand jury, Nixon resigned from office before facing prosecution.

So two Republican presidents have come closest to being prosecuted for crimes committed during their time in the White House. Nixon found little support from fellow Republicans, while Trump still enjoys considerable support from his base, though it is steadily slipping.

The question of how Democrats would respond to a Democratic president being credibly accused of crimes as bad as those committed by Trump interests me. 

My wife, a Democrat like me, believes that members of our political party wouldn't stand for the outrageous behavior that Trump engaged in during his four years in office (thank heavens it wasn't eight).

Laurel thinks that Democrats care more about ethics than Republicans, who are more prone to being concerned about maintaining power in the sense of "ends justify the means." In large part I agree with her. 

Republicans do appear to fall in line behind a leader more than Democrats do. This makes them vulnerable to a malevolent leader like Donald Trump who has been able to maintain much of his base in the Republican Party even as evidence of his numerous crimes accumulates.

My own view is a bit less confident in the willingness of Democrats to hold a Democratic president accountable for serious wrongdoing while in office. (Compared to Trump, I don't see what Bill Clinton did to be anywhere near as serious.)

I do believe that a Trumpian candidate wouldn't make it very far in Democratic presidential primaries. Democrats care about ethics. They also care about electability. I suspect that this would prevent a Trump-like Democrat from ever becoming president.

But if he or she did, another factor would come into play, the same one that helped Trump remain popular among Republicans during his time in office: producing results. 

I try to imagine how I'd react if a Democratic president had managed to get several liberal Supreme Court justices confirmed; passed major legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ban assault weapons, increase taxes on billionaires, make Puerto Rico and the D.C. states, and other Democratic priorities -- then was enmeshed in a major scandal.

Would I be more willing to overlook the scandal because of all the good the Democratic president had ben able to accomplish? Sure, I would. And I think lots of other Democrats would feel the same way.

Thus while I'm fine with being critical of Republicans who stand by Trump no matter what horrible things he does, I have to admit that while I'd never be OK with a Democrat who acted just as badly, I'd overlook some ethical failings if that leader was able to produce significant benefits for the nation. 

Which means I can't be totally holier-than-thou when it comes to Republicans defending Trump, though I am confident that I'd be less willing to go along with a Democrat doing everything Trump did while in office.

We must keep supporting Ukraine, says Nicholas Kristof

This isn't the cheeriest time in Oregon. It's cold. We're approaching the shortest day of the year, so it's dark a lot.

But imagine that a malevolent foreign power who wants to make Oregon part of their country was attacking our electricity infrastructure with missiles and drones, causing our state to suffer massive electrical blackouts in winter.

And those attacks keep happening. As soon as we make repairs and get the lights and heat on again, the foreign power strikes another time, plunging a large share of Oregon's population back into cold and darkness.

Oh, and to make matters worse, that foreign power isn't only attacking civilian areas from afar. It first invaded Oregon eight years ago and has been fighting to take more of our territory ever since -- committing horrendous war crimes such as torture, rape, bombing of hospitals and schools.

What I just described is only imagination for Oregon. But it's reality in Ukraine. 

Nicholas Kristof, after unsuccessfully attempting to run for Oregon governor this year, has returned to his job at the New York Times as a columnist. Yesterday the Times published a great piece by Kristof, Are We in the West Weaker Than Ukrainians?
Download Opinion | Are We in the West Weaker Than Ukrainians? - The New York Times

I highly recommend that you read the whole column, especially if you have some doubts that the United States should continue supporting Ukraine in its fight against Putin's Russia invasion. Here's some excerpts.

“We will beat the Ukrainian out of you so that you love Russia,” a Russian interrogator told one torture survivor I spoke to in Ukraine, before he whipped her and raped her. That seems a pretty good summation of Vladimir Putin’s strategy.

It isn’t working in Ukraine, where Putin’s atrocities seem to be bolstering the will to fight back. That brave woman triumphed over her interrogators, albeit at horrific personal cost.

But I worry that we in the West are made of weaker stuff. Some of the most momentous decisions the United States will make in the coming months involve the level of support we will provide Ukraine, and I’ve had pushback from some readers who think President Biden is making a terrible mistake by resolutely helping Ukraine repel Russia.

...The fundamental misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some progressives on the left) is that we’re doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We are holding Ukraine’s coat as it is sacrificing lives and infrastructure in ways that benefit us, by degrading Russia’s military threat to NATO and Western Europe — and thus to us.

“They’re doing us a favor; they’re fighting our fight,” Wesley Clark, the retired American general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. “The fight in Ukraine is a fight about the future of the international community.”

If the war ends in a way favorable to Russia, he argues, it will be a world less safe for Americans. One lesson the world would absorb would be the paramount importance of possessing nuclear weapons, for Ukraine was invaded after it gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s — and Russia’s nuclear warheads today prevent a stronger Western military response.

“If Ukraine falls, there will certainly be a wave of nuclear proliferation,” Clark warned.

For years, military strategists have feared a Russian incursion into Estonia that would challenge NATO and cost lives of American troops. Ukrainians are weakening Russia’s forces so as to reduce that risk.

More broadly, perhaps the single greatest threat to world peace in the coming decade is the risk of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that escalates into a war between America and China. To reduce that danger, we should help Taiwan build up its deterrent capacity — but perhaps the simplest way to reduce the likelihood of Xi Jinping acting aggressively is to stand united against Russia’s invasion. If the West falters and allows Putin to win in Ukraine, Xi will feel greater confidence that he can win in Taiwan.

...In arguing for the West to stand with Ukraine, I’ve emphasized our national interest in doing so. But we have values at stake as well as interests, for there is also a moral question to face.

When one nation invades a neighbor and commits murder, pillage and rape, when it traffics in thousands of children, when it pulverizes the electrical grid to make civilians freeze in winter — in such a blizzard of likely war crimes, neutrality is not the high ground.

Let’s not let Russia beat the Ukrainian out of us: The world could use a spinal transplant from brave Ukrainians.